Policy
Initiatives to Address Wayward Waste
John H.
Tibbetts
EDITOR’S
NOTE: This problem was one of former state Rep. Donna Walsh (D-Charlestown)priorities. The Tea Partier who defeated her, Flip Filippi, has different
priorities and a very different political agenda.
A few
times a year, volunteers fan out along the causeway that links the South
Carolina mainland with the seashore community of Folly Beach to clean up
plastic bottles, straws, bags, and other debris from along the road and the
salt marsh. Some of this debris has come from cities miles away.
On windy days,
litter is often blown off city streets into waterways. During rainstorms,
debris floats into drains that empty into rivers. Other trash probably came
from places closer to home.
“I see bags and other plastic flying off the beds
of pickup trucks going down the causeway,” says Marty Morganello, who organizes
the cleanups for the Charleston-area chapter of the nonprofit Surfrider
Foundation. “I see them coming out the open windows of cars and out the backs
of garbage trucks and even recycling trucks. This material is lightweight, and
if you don’t secure it, it will fly away.”
Beach cleanups yield enormous amounts of trash, with plastic
items a major constituent.1 Although
the human health impacts of this marine plastic pollution remain poorly
characterized, it is widely seen as an emerging problem that deserves much more
research attention.2
Sources of Marine Plastic Pollution
Lost and discarded nets and lines from fishing vessels are
important contributors to marine debris, especially in heavily fished areas.
These vessels also lose plastic floats, traps, pots, and other gear. Other
sea-based sources of plastic pollution include oil and gas platforms, aquaculture
facilities, and cargo ships that lose containers to the sea.3
Plastic debris from land comes primarily from two sources:
first, ordinary litter; and, second, material disposed in open dumps or landfills
that blows or washes away, entering the ocean from inland waterways, wastewater
outflows, and the wind.4 Major waterways can transport a great deal of plastic
waste. One study estimated that the Danube River, for example, transports 4.2
metric tons of plastic into the Black Sea each day.5
Lightweight plastic items tend to float in water and can be
carried by currents great distances. By one report, plastic cargo lost from
ships has been found more than 10,000 kilometers from where it was lost.6
Likewise, currents can carry floating fishing nets
hundreds of miles from where they were last used, according to Nancy Wallace,
director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Marine
Debris Program.
The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands do not have significant
fishing nearby—they lie within the largest marine wildlife reserve in the
world—but in 2014 NOAA-supported collection efforts there rounded up about 52
metric tons of lost nets and other plastic debris.7
A working group of researchers recently estimated that just 20
countries, out of a total of 192 with coastlines, are responsible for 83% of
the plastic debris put into the world’s oceans. Lead author Jenna R. Jambeck,
an environmental engineer at the University of Georgia, and her colleagues
estimated that, all together, these 192 countries produce some 275 million
metric tons of plastic waste each year. Of that volume, about 4.8–12.7 million
metric tons of mismanaged plastic waste is thought to have entered the ocean in
2010.4
“That is the same as five five-gallon bags filled with mixed
plastic on every foot of coastline around the world,” says Jambeck. Without
improvements to waste management infrastructure, and assuming a
business-as-usual projection of increasing coastal populations, economic
growth, and use of plastics, the authors predict this volume of plastic debris
could more than double by 2025.4
The Impact of Coastal Countries
The United States makes a significant contribution to marine
plastic pollution, but it’s only twentieth on the list of coastal nations that
produce the most plastic waste from land. The top spots are filled by a number
of rapidly developing countries with expanding populations near coastlines and
poor systems of waste management, including China, Indonesia, and the
Philippines.4
One of the major drivers of this trend in developing countries
is the very rapid growth of “megacities,” defined as urban areas with
populations exceeding 10 million. More than 70% of megacity growth is said to
occur outside the formal planning process, and nearly a third of the urban
population in developing countries lives in slums or informal settlements that
lack city services, including solid-waste disposal.8
According to Jambeck and colleagues, a nation’s population
density within 50 kilometers of the coast is the primary determinant of its
land-based contribution to marine pollution.4 For instance, about 74% of Indonesia’s population and 83%
of the Philippines’ population live in coastal regions.9
The second determinant is how much waste overall a
coastal nation produces on a per-capita basis. At 2.58 kilograms per person per
day, the United States produces far greater volumes of waste per capita than
any other nation on the top-20 list except Sri Lanka, and more than twice as
much as China.4
The third determinant is how much of a country’s waste,
including plastic material, is mismanaged. The United States does well on that
score. “U.S. mismanaged waste is only due to litter,” says Jambeck. “We have a
waste-management infrastructure that allows everyone an opportunity to throw
something away properly.” China’s coastal population is about 2.5 times larger
than that of the United States but is estimated to produce more than 30 times
more mismanaged plastic waste.4
The geographies of countries play an important part in their
contribution to marine debris. Among the top 20 ocean polluters are Sri Lanka,
an island nation; archipelago countries, such as the Philippines and Indonesia;
and countries with long coastlines, such as China and Vietnam.4
“This study [by Jambeck et al.] provides a first cut at how you
could focus efforts in places around the world and then build some strategies
to stem that flow of plastics,” says George H. Leonard, chief scientist of
Ocean Conservancy, an advocacy organization based in Washington, DC.
“Marine
debris is a global problem, but this study shows that you can work on a smaller
suite of geographies [and] that you could solve a big part of the problem at
the global level.” The key, he says, is to improve waste management in a
relatively small number of countries.
Extended Producer Responsibility
Some European nations have developed a model that other
countries and regions could emulate to better manage their plastic waste and
reduce marine pollution. It is based on the principle of extended producer
responsibility (EPR), which was first formally outlined in an internal Swedish
government report in 1990.10
The idea
behind EPR is to shift financial responsibility for end-of-life disposal to
product manufacturers, thereby providing an incentive for improved product
design, reuse, and recycling.11
In an EPR scheme, brand owners must pay the costs of tracking,
managing, and recycling or disposing of packaging after their products have
been used.11 EPR is usually implemented through take-back legislation
that requires manufacturers to recover their packaging after product
consumption.
Some producers pay a fee to organizations that collect and recycle
the packaging. Container-deposit systems that some U.S. states have for soda
bottles are one example of an EPR initiative.12
Many European nations have not only passed EPR laws to increase
reuse and recycling of plastics but also are diverting plastics to power plants
for use as fuel for heat and electricity (a process called waste-to-energy, or
WTE).13 In Europe, an estimated 25.2 million metric tons of
post-consumer plastic was discarded in 2012, according to the manufacturers
association PlasticsEurope.14
Of that amount, 26% was recycled, 36% was recovered for
fuel, and 38% went to landfills.14In 2012 the United States produced approximately 29
million metric tons of post-consumer plastic waste but recycled only 9% of it
and used perhaps 16% for fuel.15
Nine European nations have banned landfills in part because
available land is scarce in their densely populated areas. One result of this
legislative decision is that 90–100% of plastics are recycled or used for
energy production in these countries. But several other countries still
landfill more than 60% of their waste, and some of these, especially in Eastern
Europe, still depend totally on landfills. PlasticsEurope is calling for zero
plastic waste going to European landfills by 2020.14,16
“Europeans have developed pretty robust recycling and energy
recovery systems to manage their plastic waste,” says Steve Russell, vice
president of the plastics division of the American Chemistry Council. “A
primary driver for those systems has been the desire to capture energy and to
remain as energy-independent as they can [while also dealing] with the landfill
bans.”
The United States, by contrast, has more acreage to build landfills and
much lower prices for conventional energy sources, Russell says. “Whatever
systems we design in the U.S.,” he says, “need to reflect the local conditions
we have here.”
EDITOR'S NOTE: Charlestown Town Council Boss Tom Gentz, one of the CCA Party's leaders, is on the record as believing that producer responsibility is "onerous."
Fate
of Plastics in the Ocean
Plastics in the ocean degrade into smaller pieces from the effects
of sunlight, oxidation, and the abrasion of waves and currents, becoming
smaller and smaller often to the point they are no longer visible to the naked
eye.22 Marine organisms from zooplankton to fish consume these
so-called microplastics, mistaking them for food.23,24,25
The consumption of plastic by marine organisms adds persistent,
bioaccumulative, and toxic substances to the aquatic food chain.26,27 However, it is not clear what the net effect of plastics
may be in either transferring persistant pollutants or reducing their
bioavailability. Participants at a recent workshop convened by the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency concluded that the state of the science does
not currently allow an assessment of possible human health risks from the
ingestion of seafood contaminated with microplastics.28
The Economics of Plastic Waste
For years, China was the primary buyer for low-quality “mixed
bales” of plastic scrap—often contaminated with food, dirt, and nonrecyclable
materials—that do not have a commercial market in the United States. China
converts much of this scrap into feedstock, or resin, for its expanding
manufacturing sector. But some portion of the scrap can’t be recycled and ends
up in China’s landfills.17
In 2013 China enacted its so-called Green Fence operation to
improve quality controls and stem the import of low-quality plastic scrap that
would have to be landfilled. While exports of U.S. plastic scrap to China fell
18% from 2012 to 2013,18the U.S. plastics recycling industry responded to
Operation Green Fence by updating its facilities to produce a “cleaner, more
consistent bale,” says
Keith Christman, managing director of plastics markets
for the American Chemistry Council. “The quality of recycled plastic has gone
up, so the market has remained strong and recovered,” Christman says. “As the
markets have grown and the ability to separate materials has grown, so those
changes have come together to provide more value, and more market, for that
material.”
Despite China’s restrictions, U.S. plastics recycling continued
to grow in 2013, with plastic bottle recycling up by 4.3% over 2012,19 and polyethylene film recycling up by
11%.20 Recycling of non-bottle rigid materials (e.g., yogurt
tubs, clamshell containers) declined by just under 1% in 2013 but overall has
tripled since 2007 to more than 1 billion pounds per year as more communities
have added non-bottle rigid containers to their collection programs.20
Plastic polymers are almost completely derived from
petrochemicals, depending on which feedstock is most cost effective at the
point where the feedstock is produced. (According to Christman, more than 70%
of U.S. plastics are made from domestic natural gas.)
Plastic recycling
increases when it’s cheaper to create resin from recycled waste that it is to
create it directly from fossil fuels, says Jim Glauser, a specialty chemicals
expert and associate director at IHS, a U.S.-based information business. To
improve recycling rates, “you need to improve the collecting, sorting, and
processing of plastic waste to lower the cost and improve the quality of resin
from recyclables,” Glauser says.
Seeking Solutions
Over the coming decades, the volume of plastic waste moving from
the land into the sea is expected to increase if the many coastal economies and
populations around the world continue to expand without taking steps to manage
their municipal solid waste.
Marine plastic pollution will remain a difficult problem to
solve because it represents a “fundamental market failure” on a worldwide
scale, says Leonard of Ocean Conservancy. He explains, “The production of
plastic is ramping up,14 but
society isn’t able to keep up with that waste.”
NOAA’s Wallace believes gear markings or a global system for
reporting lost gear would be helpful in managing sea-based plastic pollution.
“Today, we can’t trace any of that gear back [to its source], ” she says. “It
would be good to know which countries many of these nets are coming from, so we
could find practices that would stop it from happening in the first place.”
In 2012 Ocean Conservancy mobilized a new effort called the
Trash Free Seas Alliance®, which includes chemical and plastics companies,
producers of plastic consumer items, economists, environmental scientists, and
conservation groups. The alliance is using the cross-sector expertise of its
members to develop innovative, sustainable strategies to eliminate ocean waste.21
“We need a better understanding of the economic restraints to
solve the plastic debris problem,” Leonard says. “We are looking at business
practices that could allow greater recapture, recovery, reuse. Then we can
identify and craft a suite of locally relevant solutions that make sense for
business and for the ocean.”
John H.
Tibbetts, based in Charleston, SC, is the former editor of Coastal Heritage, the
magazine of the South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium.
Citation: Tibbetts JH. 2015. Managing marine
plastic pollution: policy initiatives to address wayward waste. Environ Health
Perspect 123:A90–A93; http://dx.doi.org/10.1289/ehp.123-A90
News Topics: Industry Issues, International
Environmental Health, Laws, Regulations, and
Policy, Marine and Coastal
Science, Plastics, Recycling, Waste Disposal
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